This story about marketing Georgia Tech season tickets is almost too funny for words. Almost.

… Georgia Tech is hoping Aspire will be able to continue a success story that associate athletics director Wayne Hogan and Aspire GM Fagan were eager to tell during a presentation in mid-June at the College Athletic Business Management Association convention in Orlando.

Standing before a packed meeting room, Hogan explained the humbling experience that led the school to hire Aspire, and Fagan discussed how its system works.

Coming to Georgia Tech in 2006, Hogan said he figured selling the Yellow Jackets in a huge metropolitan area “ought to be a piece of cake. If I can’t do this, I’m in the wrong business.”

Three years later — surrounded by the economic slowdown, four pro teams in Atlanta and the University of Georgia in nearby Athens — Hogan “out of desperation” met with Aspire CEO Bernie Mullen, who had formed his firm after working as an executive in college sports and with teams in the NHL, NBA and Major League Baseball.

The “is hoping” kind of foreshadows the punchline.

… Even with Aspire, Georgia Tech’s football season-ticket sales have decreased from 26,308 in 2009 to 22,848 so far in 2011, Hogan says.

However, because the firm seeks only new sales — not renewals — it has “turned what would have been a monumental decline into a moderate decline,” Hogan says…

For Tech, that constitutes a raging success story. Hopefully that means it should still be fairly easy for Georgia fans to get ahold of tickets for the game at BDS this year.